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Oldfart,
Can you share some recipes for cheese. I belive you said you made it.

We are over run with milk, and looking for ways to use it and store it.

Thanks

Here's the recipe I used. You'll need some Mesophilic direct set culture, then just follow the recipe. The cheddaring procedure is a bit of a pain, but it's worth it. We end up eating the curds before they even get packed into the cheese mold.

The Following User Says Thank You to olfart For This Useful Post:

Thanks. M wants to try it soon. We need to order the right stuff for it. One recipe says age at room temp, but others say 45 degrees. What do you use for aging if you do a wheel?

I won deed about a hole in the deck of the milk stand, but I figured there was a reason not to do so, since all of the commercially made stands do not have one.

Our current milker is producing 1/2 gallon per day. We have a young doe pregnant with her first, and hopefully she will produce a little more. Her blood lines are all commercial dairy lines. The one in milk now was a commercial dairy cull.

2 days worth of milk from her makes enough farm style cheese to last a week depending on how the wife uses it. It makes a killer cheese cake, great stuffed pasta and spinach rolls, and is good on crackers when seasoned a little.

I was worried about time, but it takes maybe 15 minutes to milk and filter. The cheese making is the time consuming part.

I haven't tried cream cheese yet, but when I sell off some kids maybe I'll have enough milk to try it. Unfortunately I've gotten neighbors and friends hooked on goat milk, and now I have to feed their habit. What cream cheese recipe are you using? Or are you making cheesecake with the farm style cheese?

I'm aging the cheese in an old styrofoam ice chest in the corner of the kitchen. I use Gatorade bottles filled with water and frozen to keep the temp around 45 - 50. It takes a bit of experimentation to figure out how often I have to change out the bottles and how many bottles to use, but it works pretty well.

As for the hole in the stand, I'm figuring on saving the plug and putting steel bars spaced around the edge to keep the goat from falling through, then lifting the plug out as needed for the bucket. It'll sure make it easier to milk. Another thing I'd considered was to drill a 3/4" hole in the floor, slide the bucket under the floor, and stick a large funnel through the hole. The concern with that idea is, I don't know what's lurking on the underside of the floor that might decide to drop into the bucket.

As a follow-up, I decided to forgo the bucket-size hole and go with a 1" hole in the floor. The underside of the stand was amazingly clean, so no issues with stuff falling into the bucket. I do, however, need to drill another 1" hole about 4" farther back than the first one. She leans back in the stanchion, making for a long reach to hit the funnel.

How are you controlling flies? Those are my nemesis. I have used the fly predators, traps, sprays, etc. The best thing I have found is Bayer quick bait it is granular and can be sprinkled out or mixed as a paste and pained on surfaces or used in a bait station.

My one nanny is only producing 1/2 gallon or slightly more per day, but even so, we have milk and cheese overflowing the fridge. How successful have you been with freezing it?

I use the "Big Bag" fly traps, but they're not tremendously effective. The only milk I've frozen is what my wife later uses to make goat milk soap, other than freezing some colostrum to save for emergencies.

My mom used to freeze retail cow's milk with no issues, and she'd freeze the skim that Dad uses.

When I was buying raw, sometimes the dairy would give me some at reduced price because it was in the chiller too long and froze, small flecks of the butterfat would be visible as it separated a little. Shake the jug, good to go. They don't sell raw any more, but the low-temp pasteurized is available if I want it.